Green Gift Wrap

The idea of buying wrapping paper, wrapping gifts in it, opening the gifts, and throwing the wrapping paper out drives me crazy - it’s just so wasteful.  During the winter holidays, 4 million tons of wrapping paper and shopping bags are thrown away.  So, last year we started using fabric gift bags (see Green Gift Bags and the picture at right) and this year we added Furoshiki gift wrapping.  Furoshiki is the Japanese tradition of wrapping gifts in beautiful swaths of cloth – that you can reuse rather than throw away.  In addition to using fabric for wrapping gifts this year, I also cut the tags from paper shopping bags and used twine from the goats hay for attaching the tags – no wastefulness here.  The illustration below shows how basic Furoshiki is done – it’s even easier than making fabric gift bags!

This is how it looks in practice.

Step 1, place object in center of furoshiki:

Step 2, wrap the top and bottom corners over object.

Step 3, bring together right and left corners.

Step 4, tie a knot with right and left corners over wrapped object.

Step 5, admire the final product and how easy that was!  I could use a little practice at making them look neat and beautiful, but  the idea is good.